You know, one of the names in my family is Schwimmer. I’m pretty close to being one. So there is no hesitation about the following statement:
I. WAS ON. A BREAK!
(I’d say ask someone who watched TV in the 90s, but I understand it has come roaring back among the young people.)
I’m not sure why I was on a break, and more to the point, I’m not sure why I’m blogging again. I refer you and myself to the framed cartoon by James Thurber on my bookshelf: a woman is speaking to two other people about a fourth person on her knees tending flowers. The first woman explains: “She has the true Emily Dickinson spirit, except that she gets fed up occasionally.”
So there that is.
I will not bore you with that with which I was fed up. Yeah, snappy syntax was not one of those things.
I’ve found myself again jotting down unrelated trains of thought on creativity and liking how unrelated they are. Maybe I was fed up with a sense of set destination for the blog.
So here’s April: National Poetry Month and National Decorating Month, starting with a day for fools, with Shakespeare’s birthday on the way. Perfect time to begin blogging again, I guess. I think I plan to drop Creativity on you from lots of angles, including all those above, and even ideas and bits for a book I’m dreaming up.
NO, the blog’s re-birth is not to tugboat the book along. Shhh.
So, April 1. Let’s talk hats. Specifically, let’s talk about the jester’s hat, aka the fool’s hat or the “cap and bells”. Perfect, right? I always thought this headgear with the two or three jingling tentacles was an act of creativity, Someone’s image of court jesters of olden times that somehow stuck.
After all, it was illustrator Sidney Paget who put the never-mentioned deerstalker on Sherlock Holmes’s head. Talk about some serious branding and an immortal hat!
Several years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA had a wonderful exhibit on hats, both as fashion history and artistic creation. And, Lo, there was jester’s hat from days of yore. I was so surprised the icon was for real, and I blame Paget.
The “hat” in today’s visual is a miniature of the ship Belle Poule, an 18th-century frigate that did France proud in battle. Adorning already highly dressed hair with a ship as a chapeau became most fashionable. Yes, my book involves historic objects, why do you ask?
The Creative (Almost) Full-Timer 